I got this because it intrigued me. You may get a sense of why from the blurb:
The authors of Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World believe they've found the way out of ... our usual alternatives for viewing the world's many religions—whether exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World critiques exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, introducing the Mahayana philosophy of emptiness and dependent arising, along with its distinction between ultimate truth and conventional truth. It then applies this philosophy to an urgent question that bedevils modern people: how to practice one's chosen faith in the awareness of many other honored and attractive paths.
A number of things in that deserve more thinking about. One is to further interrogate the tripartite distinction that has so much dominated Western Christian thinking for the last century -or more. There are things in this admittedly logical categorisation that fail to do justice by the concerns arising from experience. At the very least they bespeak an approach inattendant to methodology in relation to epistemology and evidence.
The other thing that's really intriguing is seeing Mahayana philosophy in such a way as to deploy it, potentially, in ways similar to how Christian thinkers have used Plato, Aristotle, existentialism and so forth. So seeing whether and how that could work is interesting. In a sense it is an inter-faith move, but what we think of as a religion we label Buddhism may in some respects be better thought of as a philosophy which accrued religious seeming practices. Perhaps that is like Pythagorean philosophy or even Stoicism.
To one of my earlier selves that would sound a bit worrying, and to others who hold views like that earlier self of mine it will sound well dodgy. Let me, then, add to the intrigue by quoting something else from the introduction.
...such an approach serves the truth without pretended claims of capturing the one and only truth, each of us in our different traditions are freed to develop apologetic, and indeed missionary, approaches for our traditions that both recommend our faith and learn from the faiths of others.
When I read that I began to think that perhaps this book did indeed have an approach which would help me to recognise and bring together my own emerging approach. I've tended to say that the centre of gravity of my own approach is 'inclusivism' but I'm not always sure that it fits well with the sense also that we can be entirely too sure that our language and symbols are sufficient to assess what others may or may not be expressing in very different thought-worlds.
I found the exposition of theravada thinking really interesting and helpful and also the correlation of some of it with apophatic Christian theologies. I am wondering whether it is better to think of it as not so much a 'philosophy as a methodology -a bit more like science: a way to proceed rather than an explanation. I kept thinking about scientific method as I was reading the explanation of Yogacara thinking about thinking and the importance of attending to what influences our perceptions and getting to understand our own built-in biases and prejudices and how we come to decide on things. So, an approach that is attentive to the fragility of language as a vehicle for thought and perception and its weakness in transmitting experience, is important.
One quote which seemed to be summative of a big chunk of the middle of this book is this:
As mediated through words, doctrines are subject to intelligent and rational analysis. They are to flow stream-like through our lives and our cultures, but not to pool and become stagnant, or congeal into the icy dogma of a hardheaded and biased believer.
For me this fits well with my version of inclusivism which differs from what is explained in this book in that it is critical of the religious frameworks that are its carriers as much as those of other faiths and religious institutions.
At this point I still have more to read, so more later; but I have to post this now because I said I would ... watch this space.
Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World on Amazon #GroundingOurFaith
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